British productivity was growing steadily if slowly in the years before the financial crisis struck but it’s now some 16% below its pre-crisis level. The Bank of England has published a paper in their  quarterly bulletin of economic research, examining the competing explanations for the productivity puzzle and has a stab at estimating how much

Many countries have productivity centres to advise their government of productivity and related issues. But do they do any good? Is productivity something that can be shaped and steered by government? I would say 'YES' from my experience in the UK - but not always in ways that might be expected. Twenty or thirty years

Most of the time we get things right.... at least if we have the skills to accomplish what we set out to do  Occasionally, though, we slip on a banana skin - and we get something wrong. A defect in Lean terms (one of the 7 wastes). It is almost impossible to avoid all defects

I have been in the productivity' business' for longer than I care to remember. Sometimes, I feel that the longer I am in the business, the less I know - or the less I feel confident to declare. I started off as a 'work study engineer' - great training, but I soon realised that studying

As a productivity professional, I am used to counting every penny/cent spent and justifying the expenditure by the benefits it brings - its (perhaps tiny) contribution to the aims of the organisation. Sometimes, however, firms decide to spend money on things which have no direct utility - corporate art, charitable giving, etc.  Can such expenditure

Consultants usually specialise in .... productivity, quality, organisational development, innovation, or some other 'improvement' topic. This suggests that the business world is full of tools and techniques that must be selected carefully according to the kind of situation - and kind of problem - being considered. However my experience is that most of the tools

I was recently looking at some documents I had created a few years ago.  My first thought on reading them was that they were out-of-date, but on re-reading them, I realised the format and appearance was out-of-date but almost all the content was still relevant. Sometimes we get confused by, or seduced by, the medium

I'm sure that even if you haven't read Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, you will have seen the controversy surrounding his suggestion that we need to substantially raise taxation of the wealthy to force a 'better' redistribution of wealth (or more properly, of capital). Picketty takes special aim at those with capital

I spoke last week about the problems of interpreting productivity figures. Recent data from the UK's Office for National Statistics suggests that across the economy, productivity is still 4.3% below the pre-crisis peak and if it had continued growing at the pre-crisis trend, it would be 20% higher than today. This has some advantages.  Output is up slightly -

Explaining productivity figures needs interpretation and judgement. For example, the UK has had low productivity growth for the last few years. Why? Bank of England economists suggest that one reason might be that fewer businesses have collapsed in recent years, meaning fewer workers have moved from low productivity into higher productivity firms. As the economy